Background
Stanley Whitney was born in 1946 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Stanley Whitney was born in 1946 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Whitney studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and received a B.F.A. before moving in New York in 1968. He went on to attend Yale School of Art, where he received an M.F.A. in 1972.
Whitney had a difficult time distinguishing himself during the 1970s and 1980s when painting abstractions was widely considered out of style. Later, he had a number of solo exhibitions and has also been included in many prominent group shows.
In 2015, he was the subject of the solo exhibition “Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange,” which was held at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Whitney is currently Professor emeritus of painting and drawing at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. He lives and works in New York, NY and Parma, Italy.
Whitney has won prizes including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award in 2010 and the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting in 2011.
Whitney’s works are held in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, among others.
Quotations: “I start at the top and work down. That gets into call and response. One color calls forth another. Color dictates the structure, not the other way around.”
His wife is the painter Marina Adams.
